New Hampshire S&W part 1

First off, let's take a look at what I didn't finish before NHS&W.

It's Phroggy! Everything fits remarkably well except for the bust. (What do I expect by losing 10+ pounds? Luckily, the sweater is fixable.) I've bound off the neck several times now and I just can't get it quite right. I think Montse Stanley will have to come to my rescue. I didn't worry about it, though, since it was too hot for sweaters anyway. Ah, the perfect time to shop for wool!

This was my first fiber festival and I had a blast, even though I found precisely nothing on my shopping list. (I didn't walk away quite empty-handed; a hank of sock yarn and a few ounces of fiber jumped in my bag.) Luckily, Morgaine of Carolina Homespun was there (a store from San Francisco called "Carolina" at a New Hampshire festival, no less) to soothe my fears of running out of fiber when I move to CA in a few weeks and find my poor packed wheel.

There was tasty, tasty fiber there (if not the BFL I've been craving).


We even found out what happens to Susan's hair when she's shorn.


Next up: fleece-bearing creatures other than Susan.

Please, no more frog for Phrog!

I'm hoping that I don't jinx myself by posting this, but I think I've finished the knitting on Phroggy. (See, spirits of knitting screwups, I said "think"!)

Phroggy now has sleeves with a pair of cables twisting in a helix around the arm. (Each arm has a different direction of spiral and and different direction of cabling.)

The sleeve is a rather odd raglan. The body is a standard decrease-every-three-rounds raglan, but I wanted something that fit my shoulder and followed the line of the body. I measured the distance around my shoulder (raglan-line to raglan-line) in several spots and simply interpolated between them to design this sleeve. I put a few stitches at the armpit (blue marker) to form the underarm, knitted straight for a while, then did a decrease-every-two-rounds decrease for the remainder of the cap. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this works post-blocking, but it seemed to be fine pre-blocking.

Once Phrog dries, it'll have its seaming (har) moment of truth. Then I may need to take some of those increases out of the bust, because I've lost a bunch of weight. Perhaps it will be an appropriate temperature to wear Phrog at New Hampshire Sheep&Wool, which will be my very first S&W ever. I'm a woman on a mission, so Lucy said she'd help me avoid doing something terminally stupid. (No, I'm not buying another spinning wheel. Yet. Plus, I don't think Lucy would consider that terminally stupid.)

My camera came a waltzin' back home

A camera! With which I can take pictures! (Oh, and yes, my husband came home, too. I've been a little distracted since then.) Please blame the quality (or lack thereof) on the evident ability I have to forget how to take a good picture in only a week.

I've been staring at this sleeve for over a week now and muttering "rip? no rip? rip? no rip?". After a few days of that, even the voices in your head think you've got a screw loose. Anyway, I just can't tell if it's a little snug around this giant knitting muscle I seem to have developed in my forearm.

More than that: does this spiraling-cable motif look nice? There are really two cables, each spiraling around (and spawning extra ribs to increase the sleeve size towards the elbow). I have a plan for the shoulders which should look good... but how is this? If it's bad, tell me now!

Phroggy takes a step

Phroggy is torso-ized!

Excepting the small matter of bra straps, I think it would be cute as it is. I may take a bit out of the bust to adjust for the weight I lost, but I think it's coming out pretty nicely. If it's bad, tell me now so I can rip before I get very far on the sleeves. (The sleeves are a bit wild, so I'm going to need some stylistic help on those!)

Kitty doesn't have enough fuzz

Kitty has been shedding rather abundantly, and I believe he misses all that fur. Why would I think such a silly thing? He's either trying to be a cat in sheep's clothing or a cat filled with sheep's clothing.

He's sitting on my entire fiber stash right there. Sandra D, I need some help to catch up to you! (Actually, what I really need is some help in spinning this stuff into actual yarn. Does anyone know of a good book?)

Then he decided to eat the coned yarn I was skiening... this one earned him a time out locked in my husband's office to stand on his keyboard for a while.

Not all my fibery pursuits have been taken over by kitty, though. Here's a close up of the (former) raglan yoke of Phrog.

Instead of decreasing on the raglan lines, I'm decreasing up the center of the chest. While I like the overall effect, the cable join in that picture is just not helping. (Nor is the fact that the kitting is all scrunched up, but that's easily fixed!) True to its name, Phrog has been partially frogged again. I'm happy to say that the Silky Wool is holding up well to the knit/frog cycle. There is some grass to pick out, but that's a reasonable exchange for the nice feel of the yarn. (I'm told that processing the yarn enough to get out that last bit of VM is what makes some yarn feel odd.) I'm also thrilled with the yardage; I am going to finish the entire body in three skiens or just over! At about $7/skien, this is going to be a wonderfully soft, cozy, wonderful sweater at an impressively low price.

Lystessa, I'm so thrilled you like Phrog, and I'd be happy to write you out a pattern for your measurements. Phrog is actually a reasonably simple pattern, especially if you don't need a bust dart or a lot of waist shaping. I'm actually happy to write out a copy of whatever I've knitted for people, if they want it, just in exchange for asking nicely. (Bribery never goes over badly, either.)

Radioactictive phrog

Phrog is moving right along, though slowly. Who'd have thunk that knitting a ribbed and cabled sweater in sportweight yarn might take a while? (To be fair, I've been writing a pattern for my lovely step-grandmother on the side and made some more roving into utterly unusable yarn.) (To be perfectly honest, I was also procrastinating on the four different pieces of math I needed to do, not even accounting for some rejiggering I needed to do to account for the fact that I lost 10 pounds in the last few weeks.)

It's a little more obvious now that Phrog is another variation on the tailored cables theme. The cabling serves as a straight line that contrasts to the curves on a woman's body. There's nothing that makes something look as much itself as the presence of its opposite.

Now all I need to do is split and knit the rest of the body flat before "swatching" for the sleeves. In this case, read "swatching" as "start knitting the sleeve. rip it out and call a mulligan if it turns out wrong." Knitting is all about deniability, unless and until it felts. Then you're just screwed.

Meet Phroggy

I've frogged this green sweater so many times I think it's earned its name. Phroggy is a Delphine Wilson inspired sweater (I love her work!), worked in Silky Wool. Because I'm not sure how this lovely soft yarn will wear, I'm making the sleeves in a contrasting colour. That way, I can always replace them to 'fix' the elbow-holes I inevitably wear into my sweaters.

This is another "Chialea's wingin' it" original. If you click on the picture to enlarge it, you can see how the ribs are gradually shaped to give the sweater waist shaping. Silky Wool makes a much clingier fabric than I would have thought; Phroggy is actually designed with more ease than I put in my last sweater, but looks very curvy when worn.

Neverending carnival of excitement

How could I have knitted so many pairs of Artyarns Supermerino socks and not know that they make self-patterning sock yarn? Cathy and Sandra D, you rock for picking out this yarn!

Aren't those fabulous? I love the spiraling stripe of different colour stripes. (Click on the photo to enlarge it; the entire sock is pink/dark stripes, but the spiral is formed of a bold salmon and grey on a background of pink and brown. It's a spiral of stripes on stripes!) I wonder if the other yarn I have from them will do the same thing. Sadly, these mark the last socks for my trusty bamboo needles, which started trying to kill me with splinters. They've been found guilty of pointy treason, and will be burned at the stake or put out to pasture.

Pattern: my standard 48-stitch toe-up sock with magic cast-on and 9-deep short-row heel (may I suggest an afterthought heel instead?)
Needles: treacherous size 3 crystal palace bamboo needles
Yarn: Artyarns Supermerino in colour 141

I've gotten tired of knitting random bits of a shawl while I wait for my tailored cables sweater to dry (every. few. inches.). I'm a bit tempted to leave the sleeve as-is.

It's kinda punk, don't you think?

In any case, I'm starting another sweater. Meet Phroggy:

All I have is a Delphine-Wilson-inspired swatch, because I swatched, washed the swatch, cast on, frogged, then totally ignored the swatch, switched to different needles and a different pattern, and started cranking away. I'm winging this one much more than anything I've done before. If the waist decreases work out, I'll let it out in public.

Now the kitty wants to be petted. He'll breathe his terrible kitty-breath in my face until I do, so I'd better go for now. Here's hoping for a bunch of snow so I can work from home and be productive tomorrow!